Interview with Robert Rex Brownlee, September 10, 2006

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Robert Brownlee September 10, 2006 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Mary Palevsky © 2007 by UNLV Libraries Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews conducted by an interviewer/ researcher with an interviewee/ narrator who possesses firsthand knowledge of historically significant events. The goal is to create an archive which adds relevant material to the existing historical record. Oral history recordings and transcripts are primary source material and do not represent the final, verified, or complete narrative of the events under discussion. Rather, oral history is a spoken remembrance or dialogue, reflecting the interviewee’s memories, points of view and personal opinions about events in response to the interviewer’s specific questions. Oral history interviews document each interviewee’s personal engagement with the history in question. They are unique records, reflecting the particular meaning the interviewee draws from her/ his individual life experience. Produced by: The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project Departments of History and Sociology University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 89154- 5020 Director and Editor Mary Palevsky Principal Investigators Robert Futrell, Dept. of Sociology Andrew Kirk, Dept. of History The material in the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project archive is based upon work supported by the U. S. Dept. of Energy under award number DEFG52- 03NV99203 and the U. S. Dept. of Education under award number P116Z040093. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these recordings and transcripts are those of project participants— oral history interviewees and/ or oral history interviewers— and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U. S. Department of Energy or the U. S. Department of Education. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Robert Brownlee September 10, 2006 Conducted by Mary Palevsky Table of Contents Introduction: born Kansas ( 1924), family background, life during the Great Depression, education ( astronomy and astrophysics), work for LANL 1 Military service, World War II 3 Knowledge of and response to Trinity and Hiroshima ( 1945) 7 Reflects on motivations of LANL scientists and the military behind dropping atomic bomb on Japan 8 Talks about segregation and discrimination in the U. S. Army ( 1945) 10 Early education on the prairie ( Great Depression) and details about family background 12 Returns from World War II, undergraduate education, teaches high school for two years, returns to graduate school ( master’s, Kansas University; Ph. D., Indiana), takes position in Test Division at LANL ( 1955) 15 Compares reactions to first nuclear ( Wasp, NTS, 1955) and first thermonuclear ( Cherokee, Bikini, 1956) test 16 Work on Navajo ( Bikini, 1956) 18 Reflects on doing the science vs. war concerns 20 Discusses containment in terms of computer models and the “ inconvenient truth” of Mother Nature 20 Containment work with Alvin Graves and William Ogle at LANL 23 Talks about incidences of cancers at LANL and LLNL during testing and describes exposure during Tewa ( Bikini, 1956) 28 Nuclear accidents in the labs, and Alvin Graves’s desire for safety in testing 33 Differences in work and emphasis between LANL and LLNL, and relationship to Gary Higgins at LLNL 35 Containment work in early underground testing 36 Describes testing and effects of human exposure to heat and light 38 Discusses unexpected releases: Pike ( 1964) and Eagle ( 1963) 40 Summary of U. S. and Russian testing 44 Secret nature of some underground testing at the NTS means that the public does not understand the technical complexity of the work done. 45 Cratering of Bilby ( 1963) 47 Summary of containment, including formation of TEP and CEP 48 Conclusion: Experiments and the monetary cost 50 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Robert Brownlee September 10, 2006 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Mary Palevsky [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. Mary Palevsky: Robert Brownlee, thank you very much for meeting with me this evening. If you could begin by giving me your full name, place of birth, and date of birth, that’s a good start. Robert Brownlee: Well, Robert Rex Brownlee is my name, and I was born in 1924, so I’m eighty- two. I was born on the farm in central Kansas, and I was the oldest son, only one son, and I had two sisters, one five years younger and the other one much younger. So I grew up on the plains, the prairies of Kansas. And I was pretty much shaped by a few events that happened when I was young, quite inadvertently, I didn’t know it at the time. So what I am is a product of that youth in Kansas, I think. Both of my grandfathers homesteaded, and the environment was one of homesteaders. And there was no government, so they took care of each other, and that attitude, practice was common when I was growing up. It never occurred to you to call somebody. The neighbors took care of you, took care of each other. And so I look back upon that as an ideal way of growing up. Nobody ever had locks on their doors or anything like that. The whole community was a community of wonderful people. What kind of farming was done there? Wheat. One of my grandfathers, my father’s father, homesteaded in a place where you can also raise cattle, so we had wheat and cattle, but most of our neighbors only had wheat. So in the Depression, we went through some very bad [ times]— there was no money, but you worked on a barter system. But we had cattle and our neighbors did not, so when the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 neighbors were out of food, Dad [ Clarence Brownlee] would say we must butcher, and he would call that neighbor say, I need to butcher. Could you help? Well, the practice was when they helped, you sent meat home. And then my father would say, I think that family is out of food. I’d better butcher. Because they didn’t have cattle and we did. So I grew up in that— and what that meant was, with no money. The meat spoiled, too— no money, I had a nice beefsteak every morning for breakfast. So you had to eat it. Yeah, it was great. Now when you said things shaped you, this is one of the things you’re talking about? I asked my father— I asked question after question after question. When I was five, I asked my father, What makes the sun shine? And he said, Nobody knows. And I said, But Uncle Mason will know. And he said, No, no one in the whole world knows. So I discovered my first question for which there was no answer. Then I tried to invent other questions that would have no answers. So then I asked utterly stupid, incredibly opaque questions, trying to find other questions for which no one in the world knew the answer. But that answer, what makes the sun shine? No one knows. I’m going to find out. Someday I will. And then I mentioned that I was in my early teens, I’m not sure, thirteen, fourteen when I made lists of what I wanted to do with my life. I decided, I don’t want to be rich, although that’s tempting, but no. I don’t want to be famous; that’s not what I— what is it you want to do? I wanted to understand everything, and the reason for that, I was curious about everything, so I always asked my father question after question after question. So Hans Bethe was the guy who UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 got the Nobel Prize for answering that question [“ What makes the sun shine?”], and he was working on that problem when I was asking that question, that was in 1929, and he really didn’t solve the problem till maybe 1936 or ’ 34, along in there, still a young man. He only died, you know, within the last year. Yes, I knew Bethe. Subsequently I got my degree in astronomy and astrophysics and my [ 00: 05: 00] interest was in models of the sun, and so I spent a year doing a model of the sun at one instant in time. But when I got my degree, there were only a couple places in the world where you could go and get your hands on material as hot or hotter than in the center of the sun, and that’s what I wanted to do, and so I applied to Los Alamos and got that job. And loved every day and would’ve worked there for free. The interesting thing of an astrophysicist then being the person who knows about containment [ of underground nuclear tests] is a fascinating one. But let’s back up a little bit because I want to hear about your World War II experience. My father was a very intelligent man. He was a college man. My grandfather was a graduate of college. And out there on the prairie, that was rare. And he was very interested in world affairs. We had no electricity, no running water, anything like that, but my father kept current on what was going on in Europe. He said, I would guess in 1931, maybe, or 1932, If Adolf Hitler ever comes to power, there’ll have to be a war. So when Hitler became Chancellor in ’ 33, I knew there was going to be a war because my father had said so. And I vowed, when I’m eighteen I will enlist. And when war started in 1939, in Europe— World War II started in ’ 37, but at any rate— Why do you say that? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 That’s when the whole thing, shooting started in China. The Japanese were occupying China and then China just rose up in revolt at the Marco Polo Bridge, and that was the start in ’ 37, because then they sacked Nanking, and that was a slaughter, a terrible slaughter. So at that moment we knew we would ultimately have to have a war, my father did, with Japan. So your father talked about that, too? Yes. But I vowed I’d enlist, and when the war started in Europe in ’ 39 I said, Do you think it’ll last until I’m old enough to get in it? Because I was only fifteen. And he said, Wars are very easy to start and very difficult to stop, and so I’m afraid this will be a long war and you’ll be in it. So he did not like my plan, but when I was eighteen I enlisted. And you won’t believe this. I read. I read a lot. And I’ve forgotten the number now, but in World War I, I think there were forty million horses in Europe. Millions anyway. And they were used by all combatants. They used horses for everything. And I grew up on the farm, had my own horse, and I [ was] so stupid that I thought, well, if there’s a war, there are going to have to be horses, so I enlisted in the cavalry. And you’ve probably never heard of the cavalry. I’ve heard of the cavalry. But not in World War II. Yes, I have. I enlisted at Fort Riley, Kansas, which is a cavalry post. And the guys who enlisted with me were disillusioned right away, but I was not disillusioned until the following day. I was a slow learner. And I went through training in a tent with six of us. I was ten years younger than the next guy and twenty years younger than the oldest guy. They could not imagine anybody as dumb as I was. So they taught me well of the three armies. There’s the army of regulation, and in any kind UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 of a crisis you devolve to that army. And then there’s the army the way the officers run it, and they are unaware of the army the way the top sergeants run it and so forth. And that’s the old army that existed for all time up to the beginning of World War II. You didn’t pick that up in other elements of the Army but you did in the cavalry because they were old. When I got there, to my disgust they only had mules, and I realized this was a big mistake. I put in for transfer to the Army Air Corps and my cavalry friends were outraged [ 00: 10: 00] that I was not loyal to the cavalry and that I could be so idiotic to want to go to the Air Corps. And they said, The Army has you and it’s futile for you to put in an application. It’ll never work. And this way you’ve demonstrated your disloyalty. And my transfer came through. And I was in the Army Air Corps for a few days when I realized this is a big mistake. I should have put in for application to the cadets, to the aviation cadets, so I put in for that. And they told me, Well, you’re already in the Air Corps. They take aviation cadets from universities and colleges. And so this is a big mistake. You’ll never be accepted. But I was, and so finally I went from the cavalry to the Air Corps and then the aviation cadets. And I was happy, but in aviation cadets our officers were all ninety- day wonders, and the things I’d learned in the cavalry, how to go AWOL [ Absent Without Official Leave], how to avoid long marches, how to do incredibly complicated things almost within regulations but not— the officers in the Army Air Corps didn’t know any of those things, so I was considerably too well educated to make a good aviation cadet. At any rate, I grew up out there on the prairie. We had a sea horizon; flattest county in Kansas. And if I stood in the same place, the same star arose at the same spot every night. I knew all that. So I was interested in the sky and my father could answer my questions pretty well. And so I wanted to be a navigator. That’s what I wanted to be. I was always good at math. And so my UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 goal in aviation cadets: I was going to be a navigator. Well, they ask you what you want to be and they didn’t pay any attention to that, but that’s what I wound up. So when I graduated from navigation school in Hondo, Texas, to my great surprise I was selected as a navigation instructor. So that saved my life because everybody in my class went off to Europe and most of them got killed. But I was delayed and then when I finally did go, I went to the Pacific. And what year was that? In ’ 45. I joined in ’ 42. And I got to the Pacific— oh, when we were selected, all of a sudden we were selected as a crew, B- 29s, and when we got together for the first time, we discovered each one had been an instructor. The pilot had been a pilot instructor, the bombardier was a bombardier instructor, and so on. How come we’re all instructors? Well, it turns out we were the general’s crew, so we had this special— we were treated better. Now what does it mean that you were the general’s crew? We had a general who when he needed to go somewhere, that was his B- 29 and his crew and we did— yes. And he selected— he wanted for his crewmembers to be really experienced or knowledgeable, I should say “ knowledgeable” rather than “ experienced.” So we went off to the Marianas, but we got there just right at the end of the war. So I’d never flew to Japan in a combat mission, but I did have some missions when they were still shooting. But I got there at the end of the war. However, we knew that the probability of living through it was not very good, because you had to fly so many missions and the loss of planes. They were getting better. And the invasion of Japan was coming. And on Tinian they built a hospital on the island for people injured in the invasion. And they were just building that, getting ready for the invasion, and the longest corridor in the hospital was just a mile long, with UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 buildings off of it. And there were many corridors. And so you knew this was going to be a terrible slaughter. [ 00: 15: 00] And I was in the 504th Squadron; the 509th were the guys who dropped the atom bomb. And the 509th had a fence. Nobody else had a fence. And they didn’t do things. They didn’t seem to do anything. And so we were puzzled about that. And then it was the 509th that dropped the bomb. Harold Agnew was there. And I sent him a picture taken, I think, by one of our squadron people, and I sent him a picture last summer, I think, which he’d never seen, of Tinian. And I got it at that time when I was over there. And I have it digitized. It’s a magnificent picture of the whole island. I would like to see that. And at any rate, I sent that to Harold. And so Harold and I were there at the same time. I had no idea— well, that’s not true. By this time I knew about nuclear energy and I knew what made the sun shine, and so that’s why I wanted to go to Los Alamos. I didn’t get there of course until after the war because I had to get my degree. So the question, what makes the sun shine, my decision to understand everything combined to aim me at Los Alamos. As a young mathematically and scientifically gifted person, had you had any conception— you’re saying you knew by this time of Bethe’s work— I’m asking a question about the bomb. So when the bomb was dropped, do you remember what your response was, both personally and—. Was there a scientific understanding? They said the flash in the sky that everybody saw in the southwest. You saw this flash. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 No. But the flash that everybody saw. This was with the Trinity shot, which is in July. See, if I remember correctly, Trinity was July 6th. Sixteenth. Sixteen. August sixth was Hiroshima. Think of the short time, the incredible short time, and eerie, that flash with Trinity— the Army said an ammunition dump had blown up. And I remember we were skeptical about that. Ammunition dumps don’t do that. There’s something odd about that. And I was smart enough to know that. However, the moment we heard [ about the] atom bomb, I understood how that could be. Not in detail, of course. And we were all convinced it saved our lives. In the years since I learned some other things. At the time we knew that the Japanese had taught everybody to commit suicide when they saw their first soldier, but this was in Guam and Okinawa. I hadn’t realized that they had been very successful in indoctrinating everybody in the homeland. And so there isn’t any doubt in my mind at all, none whatsoever, that the first atom bomb saved millions of lives, most of them Japanese. We’d killed four hundred thousand people, I think, in fire bomb raids without a hint of it making any difference. And also England. Germany bombed the dickens out of London and nobody in London said to surrender. And so I was under the impression that bombing doesn’t do any good except to destroy— it doesn’t destroy their will. That was my view. And so I thought we were going to have a terrible long war, and I didn’t expect to live through it. You didn’t expect to live through it, really? I didn’t expect to live through it, because it’s going to be too long. I saw an intelligence report. As a second lieutenant I could do that, and I would go in and look at these things, and one of them was the plan for what we were going to be doing in 1947. I thought, I’ll not live through UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 another two years of this. And so the atom bomb for me was, oh, suddenly it’s over, and I hadn’t expected that. [ 00: 20: 00] I still think it was necessary to stop that invasion. However, this book [ indicating Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005] has taught me that the feelings against using the bomb in Los Alamos were much stronger than I had thought. I was aware that there were people there who did not want to see it used except as a demonstration. But there were people who said, But it might not go off. What if we have a demonstration and it doesn’t go? We had better set it off first, but not announce it as a demonstration. And the decision to use it in a Japanese city was a Washington [ D. C.] decision, not a Los Alamos decision. I think if you’d asked the Los Alamos people, they would’ve said a demonstration test. But there was another wrinkle. The scientists in Los Alamos were heavily European. They were there to get an atom bomb before Hitler did. Their concern was not Japan. When Germany surrendered, their goal had been achieved. They’d beaten Germany. So they were not interested, for the most part, in dropping it on Japan. The military people were well aware that even though it would appear that Japanese [ Japan] was defeated, that we were going to win, the real goal was to stop the war. It was not to win the war; it was to stop the war, because we’d perhaps already won it. And I think that was a legitimate goal, whereas many Los Alamos scientists did not feel that way, I think. That’s how I understood. I was told that in those early days, there were a few people whose family had been killed by the Nazis and so on— tend to be Jews— who when military people would come in from Washington, they would tremble when they saw a uniform. So they’d been traumatized in Europe, and so anybody in a military uniform frightened them badly. So there were a number of UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 people in Los Alamos who were anti- military, and I can understand that. And their interest was science, and in effect they got outvoted by the military, which I think I understand. From my point of view, being there on Tinian, fearing I’m not going to outlive this, to suddenly have the war end was— you can’t imagine what that meant. How did you actually hear about it? Was it announced? Oh yeah, everywhere. In those days the blacks were segregated from the whites. We had a kind of a ridge and we lived over on the side closer to the ocean. There was a ridge and blacks were over there. And we were all armed with .45s and everybody shot. But we noticed that blacks tended to shoot over the ridge. An unusual amount of stuff didn’t come from up there; it came from over the ridge. I remember that. And they were celebrating, but they were also expressing something. Growing up on the prairies out there, we had no black people or Italians or Greeks or anybody. We were all Northern Europeans. I had no prejudice. I was brought up not to have prejudice. I didn’t have any prejudice. I got in the Army and I discovered amazing things. And one of the things was, we had a Jewish boy from Flatbush in our outfit. And he would go not to the immediate supervisor but to the next guy up and tell him he was being discriminated against because he was a Jew, and he would get out of whatever assignments we all had. And then he would brag to us how smart he was compared to us because he got out of the work and we didn’t. And he always complained that he was [ 00: 25: 00] discriminated against because he was a Jew. And I asked this guy from New York, Are all Jews like that? He said, Only in Flatbush. [ Laughing]. And so I remember those kinds of details of discrimination, which was novel to me. I was really dumb. I was from a unique part of the world and a unique period of time and I needed to be educated on every front. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 Brownlee, is that a Scottish name? That would be my guess. Scottish. And we were Scottish Presbyterians. And the Presbyterian Scots had a very clear eye, and they had the ability to say it. And so growing up in the old Scottish Presbyterian environment was good for you. You had to think. And in my family you were allowed to escape if you were clever, so you were questioned but if you were bright you knew how to— I’ll give you an example. My grandson just came back from Iraq last week, Sunday night, week from tonight. He’s been over there a year. He was in the 101st Airborne. And his girlfriend met him there, and we were there. And she’d talked to him on the phone. And I said, How come you’ve talked with her any number of times, and you never called me? He said, Well, I’m twenty- two. Now that’s a good answer. And I said, You’ve answered well. And our kids have had the ability to answer, and it comes from the old Scottish genes, I think. There’s always a way to evade the question. How in the world did we get off on this? Well, that’s interesting because it tells me something about your directness, but yeah, that’s a great point you’re making: the import of the question is avoided by a very clever answer in your grandson’s case. Yes. I gave a lecture in China on what’s in an empty box. It was at Fudan University in Shanghai. And I had three of the grandsons with me, and so they heard that. And when they got home, my son said to my grandson, You heard your grandfather give a lecture. And he said yes. What was it? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 And he says, What’s in an empty box. And he said, But we knew that. We knew that. We didn’t need to hear the lecture. And my son Wayne said, Well, name three things that are in an empty box. And my grandson said, Actually I’ve been taught to think outside the box. I said, You pass. But that’s the kind of interaction we always had in the family, and I’m pleased to see it coming up, that there’s always a laugh associated with it. But that’s how to evade— it’s hard to put it to a test. They always pass. That’s very good. But I was that way. I think we were taught to be that way. It’s probably genetic. Cultural or genetic or some combination thereof. But I got a very good education. Let me explain. In the Depression we had no money. Two things cost money: coal— there was no wood; it’s just out on the prairie— coal for the fire and gasoline for the lantern. That cost money. We didn’t have any money. So in the wintertime we ate and went to bed. That avoided having to heat the room, and no lights. We’d go to bed, and then I’d ask my dad questions and he’d tell me stories until I went to sleep. And I so I heard the history of the Romans and the Greeks and the Egyptians and Genghis Khan and the Civil War, an enormous amount of information about the Civil War; I would ask Dad questions and he would tell me these histories. And so I got an education that transcended the school system because I learned what I wanted to know from my father on those long winter evenings in the dark. And he would talk to me until I went to sleep. I could not have had a better education, because he would [ 00: 30: 00] go into— now let me make a point. He would give me all kinds of information about the Civil War. I was telling one of the grandkids the other day about Pearl Harbor. The time between Pearl Harbor and now was the same length of time from the Civil War UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 to when my father was telling me those stories. Isn’t that amazing? The Civil War was not that far in the past. That’s right. That’s amazing. And in 1929 when I was getting this education, from the end of the Civil War in ’ 65, that’s thirty- five plus twenty- nine is sixty- four years. From Pearl Harbor to now is sixty- five years. Isn’t that amazing? It’s amazing. But that’s why I know so much about the Civil War. Did I learn it in school? No. I learned it at home. So I had an exceptional opportunity to learn beyond my years because there was no electricity, no money— all the food we needed. I didn’t think we were poor. And my father educated me. You can’t beat that. You cannot beat it. And what was your father’s name? Clarence Brownlee. And had the family been in the country during the Civil War? Yes. My ultimate ancestor came over in 1642, and they had fled from King Charles I [ spending some years in Ireland before coming to America]— and they were Protestant. And the king came by in a hunting party and the boys threw rocks at him, and he came back with troops; and they fled to Glasgow, the two Brownlee brothers, and made it across to Ireland. And one of them stayed in Ireland, and the other one came on across to this country and moved into Pennsylvania. A generation later, the son of the man in Ireland came over, so the Brownlees came a generation apart but the second one was the nephew of the first one. And so they got chased out by King Charles. Then they lived in Pennsylvania, and then a number of them came west when you could get land. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 So what were their loyalties during the Civil War, the family? North. The North. Because I know that Kansas was contested. Very, very heavily North. Kansas was populated by people who were in the North. Missouri favored the South. That’s the reason why we had a war between Kansas and Missouri. Remember [ the] Quantrill raid in Lawrence, Kansas. That’s right, I���m thinking of Lawrence. And one of the Brownlees was there, living in Lawrence at that time; Quantrill set the house on fire, and then they shot the men when they came out of the burning— so his wife put him under the carpet and drug the carpet out from the blazing house, and he was in the carpet— and that’s how he didn’t get shot. Isn’t that something? Amazing. That’s something. So we had those kind of Civil War stories. So I grew up with stories, and I asked lots of questions, so it wasn’t enough to hear about Genghis Khan; I wanted to hear all about Genghis Khan, and so on. And I couldn’t have had a better upbringing. Could not have done better. I’m sorry that kids nowadays are so poorly educated. We have great- grandkids and my problem is I can’t get my hands on them. They’re too big a generation gap. I’m sure something trickles through. That’s all very interesting, but given the— [ 00: 35: 00] Beside the point. No, it’s not beside the point because as I said, one of the things that oral history does that nothing else does is it gives you these individual personalities. Yes, and you need to know that. And you need to know these things, and it helps put you in context. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 One of the things you notice is that I enjoy those stories because there’s always some humorous aspects to them that I really do like, and that’s true of the things here at the test site. What do I tend to remember? The fun things. So when the war is over, how soon is it that you get to come home, to get back on our time line here? I came back, got the degree, college, majoring in both math and physics and a minor in education. Then I taught high school for two years, and I knew this was not— I enjoyed it. I was a pretty good teacher, I think, but I need to go back to school. And I decided I can go to graduate school and do just as well as I can teaching high school. So I went to Kansas University and got my master’s degree and then went to Indiana to get my Ph. D. And by that time we had three kids and not anything like enough money. I got $ 111.00 a month, I think. And so I worked and did extra things to make a living. So it took me four years to get my degree in Indiana, so I came out of there very late. But then when I arrived at Los Alamos, I was thirty- one years old with a brand- new Ph. D., but the average age of a staff member at Los Alamos was thirty- one when I arrived there in ’ 55. Interesting. In ’ 55. OK. I got there ten years after the war. But meanwhile I went to graduate school and did all those things. Finished college. So explain a little bit how an astrophysicist ends up at Los Alamos, even though we’re not into containment [ of underground nuclear tests] yet; we’re still in atmospheric. Well, what were they looking for in someone with your education? I was an astronomer in astrophysics. My degree at Indiana was in astronomy and astrophysics. But it was a combination of math and physics, always. And astronomy, because I loved UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 astronomy. And navigation, I loved astronomy. But I had my eye on Los Alamos because an atom bomb is hotter than the material in the center of a star. Well, I wanted to know all about that. I wanted to understand that. I didn’t have a motive of killing Germans or something. My motive was to understand everything I could. Well, they put me in the Test Division. Well, that’s exactly where I wanted to be. And I started off every day doing really well. I enjoyed every day. And I arrived in ’ 55. I saw my first nuclear explosion in February of ’ 55 [ Wasp]. And that was one kiloton. Where was that? That was here [ at the Nevada Test Site]. Here. And then in ’ 56 I saw my first thermonuclear explosion. Now let me describe this. In Kansas out on the farm we had dynamite and during the drought we would blow big holes that would fill up with water because the water table was close to the surface, and we could take dynamite and blow holes and have water for